NFA wait time data, free to use

Current wait times

Median days from filing to approval, over the last 90 days of electronically filed approvals. Based on 1,383 approvals. A lane with fewer than 15 reports in the window shows no median rather than a shaky one.

Typical range is the middle half of waits, leaving out the fastest 25% and the slowest 25%.

Monthly history

Median wait by the month the approval came through, for complete calendar months with enough reports behind them. A blank cell means that month was too sparse for that split.

JSON feed

Everything on this page, machine-readable and refreshed hourly. No key, no sign-up, no rate limit. Cross-origin requests are allowed, so you can call it straight from a browser.

https://www.nfawatch.com/data/nfa-wait-times.json

A few things worth knowing before you parse it. A median is null when the sample was too small to publish one, so check for null rather than reading it as a zero-day wait. Every wait is whole calendar days. Dates are ISO 8601.

One quirk worth knowing if you chart this: the shortest wait we record is 1 day. Approvals do sometimes come back the same day they were filed, and we store those as 1 rather than 0. So a 1 means “one day or less,” and a 0 never appears in the data at all.

Licence

This data is published under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). You can copy it, republish it, chart it, or build a product on it, including commercially. The one condition is that you credit NFA Watch and link back, so your readers can see where the numbers came from and how they were counted.

What this is, and what it is not

This is a sample of what filers told us, not a copy of the ATF’s own records. Nobody publishes the ATF’s internal queue, so every figure here describes the approvals that people chose to report. That makes it useful for seeing which way waits are moving, and wrong to read as an official processing time for any individual filing. The methodology page covers how a median gets computed and when we decline to publish one.

If you file, reporting your own approval makes every number on this page better, including the copy you republish.